INDIRA GANDHI

During the summer of 1938 Nehru and Indira were on tour of European countries, however Indira collapsed and was hospitalized for two weeks with serious attack of pleurisy. The lung disease that had been the beginning of the end for Kamla Nehru at Bhowali in 1934.  At this juncture Nan Pandit (never a congenial presence for Indira) turned up in Budapest on the first leg of an European Holiday. At the beginning of September Indira, Nehru and Nan Pandit flew together to London. Indira was admitted to Brentford Hospital in Middlesex on 15^th September, 1938.

            Her school Term began at Somerville at the start of October, but Indira was too ill to go back to Oxford even if her pass mods Latin situation had been resolved- which it had not. The doctors at Brentford Hospital had advised her to take at least one term off to recuperate in a healthy climate. This excluded London or Oxford, and Nehru pressed her to return to India with him and recover at hill station there. She was was very reluctant to be separated from Feroz, but her mother’s fate also frightened her. Her own bout of pleurisy had given her a bad scare. So Indira sailed from Marseilles with her father at the beginning of November, breaking the journey at Cairo, in order to at last visit the Pyramids. They reached Bombay on 17^th November 1938, two days before Indira’s 21^st birthday.

An interval of 5 months elapsed. First Indira went to Allahabad on her birthday on 19^th November, she came of age and enrolled in the Congress Party at its head quarter at Swaraj Bhawan.

Two weeks later she went to Almora, to the north in the United provinces, with her aunt Krishna Hutheesing and Krishna’s two little boys Harsha and Ajeet. Almora is not far from Bhowali, where Kamla had languished in a Sanatorium before going to Europe four years earlier. Almora was also were Nehru was jailed during Kamla’s last month in India. Here in a rented cottage called ‘SNOW VIEW’ . Indira felt frozen in time and space . Indira got bad cough and began running a temperature. She blamed this on the inefficient wood fires in the house which was even colder then her room at Somerville. Her health did not improve despite salubrious climate and a list of instructions sent to her by Nehru (Derived from his long familiarity with Sanatoria regimens) which included the advise to:

1.      Take your temperature morning and evening.

2.      Take three hours   rest in the afternoon and some rest before and after meals.

3.      If you feel tired increase your rest.Also if there is rise in your temperature. Indira suffered even more acutely from her separation from Feroz. In early January when Nehru visited her she told him that she wants to go to Oxford England on time for this summer term Nehru resisted because of war like situation but Indira was adamant. In April 1939 she went to Bombay and set sail for Europe on S.S straitbaird after landing at marseilles, Indira went to Paris where there were nightly blackouts and ‘Sirens … Shrieking – Away.’ When she arrived in London it too seemed poised for war and perfectly ugly Indira took a room at the Y.W.C.A in bloomsbary to be close to Feroz. Who had dropped out of London school of economics and devoted more time to Krishna Menon’s India league during this time Indira came to no Krishna well who would remain a significant character for next 35 years. In 1935 he had a nervous breakdown when a romantic relationship with an English woman named Barbara Mc Namisa foundered. He vowed never to marry again. He lived on black-tea, chased down with warn milk, with occasional buns and biscuits. In addition to tuberculosis of the kidneys, and persistent cough, he had chronic digestive problems.  

            Menon was also involved in Indira’s medical treatment in the spring of 1939. He asked Dr. P.C.  Bhandari, an Indian Physician in London who was a close friend of Nehru, to arrange a consultant for Indira with a well known Harley street respiratory specialist named Dr.Herbert. Dr. Herbert examined and X-rayed her. He told her that she had a shadow on her left lung and said that she must be ‘Very careful’ and X-rayed every six months. No one mentioned tuberculosis, but clearly this was feared.

            Both Dr. Herbert on Harley street and Dr.Bhandari urged Indira to spent a restful summer in Switzerland before going back to Sommerville. She left London on 24^th May and went to a heath resort at Stansstad on Lake Lucerne recommended by Bhandari. A month later she moved a short distance to Burgenstock, where Feroze came and stayed with her at the Park Hotel.

             They stayed in Burgenstcok nearly a month before returning to England in August. Indira wanted to do war work instead of going back to Oxford. She was X-rayed again by doctor Herbert on Harley Street  who vetoed war work. Reluctantly she agreed to return to Oxford to study for the social and Public Administration diploma. Sommerville sent her a list of necessary item to bring to college when term began on 16^th October. A gas mask , electric torch and Blackout material for windows. By the end of September Indira had also been issued an identify card and food rationing coupons.

            Early in October,1939, two weeks before she was due back at Sommerville, Indira came down with a bad cold that rapidly developed into another severe attack of  pleurisy. Her fever shot up to 103 degrees , her weight dropped from 92 to 77 Lbs. Her chest was very painful and congested with fluid. Agatha Harrison  arranged for Indira to be moved by ambulance to Brentford hospital. Her retuned to Oxford was cancelled and Bhandari , the Harley Street specialist and the Brentford doctors all adviced her to go to a sanatorium in Switzerland as soon as she was well enough to leave hospital.

            No one uttered the word Tuberculosis but the feared  prognosis was clear to every one , including Indira.Agatha Harrison wrote to Nehru.’it was no light job these days getting a Swiss visa & a British exit permit. Feroze-whom Agatha described as ‘a great help and like a faithful dog-spent whole days at the Swiss legation. Indira was still in Bretford Hospital on her 22^nd birthday on 19 November 1939,when she was allowed to get up and have ‘a real, regular bath, the first since she fell ill five weeks ago.

              Finally, at the beginning of December, Indira’s passport, exit permit and Swiss visa were all in order. Nehru wanted Indira to go to Davos-where Thomass Mann’s novel about a tuberculosis sanatorium,’ The Magic Mountain’, is set. But Gandhi had written to Agatha Harrison and Dr.Bhandari that Indira should go to Dr Auguste Rollier’s sanatoriumin Leysin in the French Swiss Alps.Gandhi himself had visited Rollier’s sanatorium in Leysin in 1931 and was much impressed by his ‘heliotherapy’ regime for tuberculosis which entailed daily, long exposure to the sun year-round, even in the dead of winter. Gandhi had fruitlessly recommended sun bathing for Kamala, and now he again urged Nehru and Agatha Harrison to have Indira follow this regimen. And so it was decided.

             Indira and Agatha flew to Paris on the morning of 14 December 1939.They rested in a hotel all day and then took the night train to Geneva.Early on the 15^th they traveled on to Leysin,a small, story-book village high in the Alps. The last leg of the journey was a steep climb in a cog-wheel train, up past the timber line , towards the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi and Mont Blanc beyond.As night was falling, they arrived in a white,frozen world of sickness and death.

Indira was put to be bed as soon as she and Agatha Harrison arrived at Les Frenes sanatorium perched on a hill above the village of Leysin. Unlike her pokey Somerville quarters, her room there was large and airy with tall windows and a balcony that looked out on to the  Alps. Dr.Rollier- a ruddy-cheeked man in his sixties with an impeccable bedside manner-examined Indira the next day. He told her that  there was ‘no disease, only a scar from the pleurisy’, but he was concerned about her ‘great weakness –thinness and lack of muscle’. He prescribed strict bed rest for an initial period of three months ,and cheerfully pointed out that the beds at Les Frenes were all equipped with wheels so Indira  would not  be isolated in her room.

            To Agatha Harrison,in private,Rollier outlined his standard tuberculosis treatment regime that Indira was to follow :’sun treatment, rest ,exercise to develop her chest muscles and  good food’.Agatha remained in Leysin for 3 days to settle Indira.She bought her a wireless’ to keep her in touch with the world’.

           Until the end of the 19^th century Leysin, high in the Alps above the Rhone valley,had been a tiny, isolated agricultural village.It would have remained entirely unknown but for the fact Thomas Malthus, a hundreds years earlier ,had devoted six pages to Leysin’s salubrious climate and the long life expectancy of its inhabitants in his Essay    on the Principle of Population .During the first decade of the 20^th century, Leysin was transformed in to a fashionable mecca for tuberculosis patients. In 1939 it had 5,698 inhabitants, 3,000 of  whom were patients in its 70 clinics and sanatoria. Eighteen of these establishments were owned and run by Dr Auguste Rollier , the presiding genius of Les Frenes-his largest and most luxurious sanatorium.

           In 1903, as a young surgeon, Rollier had come to Leysin with his  fiancée who had pulmonary tuberculosis. Her illness was the making of him. She survived, they married and Rollier transformed himself into a tuberculosis specialist.He became a fervent advocate and hugely successful popularizer of open air and sun treatment-or heliotherapy- for TB. He prefixed’ Professor’ to his name and added fashionable adjuncts to his heliotherapy  treatment: breathing exercises, Margaret Morris modern dance movements(practiced in bed), vegetarianism and occupational therapy, including basket weaving, knitting, needle work and typing. He promised –and claimed –a high cure rate.

          In reality, however, tuberculosis was still the ‘white plague’ in 1939-and incurable disease which killed at least a million people a year in Europe alone-a German bacteriologist named Robert Koch had isolated the tubercle bacillus in 1882,but until antibiotics were discovered in the 1940s, TB could not be prevented, palliated or healed. the poor-who were its principal victims-died of it in the squalid, crowded unhygienic living conditions the disease thrived upon. The privileged, like Indira Neru, migrated to mountain Sanatoria, ’medically supervised refuges,’where they submitted to a treatment of strict rest and over –feeding. The medical rationale for this regime was that it would enable the lungs to recuperate and heal  themselves.Rollier’s unique contribution of heliotherapy to the treatment of tuberculosis derived from the discovery that sun light killed the tubercle bacillus. The sun’s rays could indeed alleviate and some times even cure tuberculosis  of the skin and other exposed parts of the body .But the sun, ofcourse, could not penetrates to the lungs, and one third of Rollier’s cases were pulmonary TB patients .

               ‘The Sun Doctor ‘,as the Rollier was known , had built Les Fernes in 1911 as a model heliotherapeutic sanatorium-not that it was called a sanatorium. None were in Leysin.Most sanatoria and clinics were euphemistically designated ‘hotels’(The Grand Hotel, Hotel Belvedere and Hotel Chamossaire among others), but some simply had attractive –sounding names such as Les Fernes(or’the Ashes’,the kind of tree that surrounded the cilinic).Certainly Les Fernes resembled a fashionable hotel rather than  a hospital with its central hall(where films were shown and concerts and other entertainments  held),dining room, ladies salon, smoking room and billiard room. The consulting rooms, laboratory, small operating theater and radio graphy department were in creetly housed in one wing.The patients’ luxurious rooms were in another wing.The whole sanatorium was centrally heated and had large windows through which Leysin’s famous sun streamed. Most patients’ rooms also had wide balconies on to which they were wheeled for hours every day and exposed to the cold alpine air and the sun’s rays. On the roof of Les Fernes-accessible by an  electric lift-was a huge solarium with views of the Alps in every direction. For the exorbitant sum of 25 francs a day,Indira was provided with her centrally heated room(though, infect, Rollier insisted that rooms be kept cool and windows open most of the day ), 4 huge meals a day,and the medical attentions of  Dr Rollier and his staff.X-rays and activities such as Margaret Morris exercises and typing lessons cost extra.

               Les Fernes, like others TB sanatoria ,was ,as one historian has put it , a place of ‘hope deferred’.Tuberculosis was infectious and therefore stigmatized. It was often concealed under the cloak of less terrifying disease-pleurisy for example: With so many sanatoria and more than half its population of TB patients,’ all of Leysin was a hospital’. Mathatama Gandhi was traveling in Switzerland in 1931,he had visited Les Fernes .Gandhi was fascinated by ‘nature’ cures and therapies and wanted to learn about Rollier’s sun treatment. Les Fernes had many non-pulmonary tuberculosis cases. These were patients with tuberculosis of the bones, joints, glands and limbs. Pulmonary TB sufferers were usually’ fashionably slender’, with an attractive pallor heightened by a feverish flush.              

               In early January 1940s,Indira wrote to Nehru that she now weighed just 84 pounds whereas Dr Rollier had told her She should weigh at least 110 for her height of five foot two inhes. Rollier now prescribed breathing exercises and the position ventrale which had Indira lying for hours on her stomach propped up by her elbows and forearms with her chest and head raised, but these manner did not increase her lung capacity or eased the pain in her chest after two months at Les Fernes.

Rollier did not discuss the condition with  Indira .’Tuberculosis’ was never uttered rationale, being that patients would lose ‘the will to live’. But evasion was harmful in Indira’s case as well as many others. Indira knew that her mother had died of Tuberculosis and that she herself had been exposed to Kamala’s TB germs over a long period of time. She was also well aware of the classic tuberculosis symptoms, many of which plagued her: weight loss, night sweats, coughing and breathing difficulties.Rollier’s treatment program was the same as that of Kamla’s. Rollier had curtailed her sunbathing, as sun was suppose to be bad for weak lungs. In his famous textbook, Heliotherapy , Rollier stated that the ‘sun cure’ was contraindicated for active cases of pulmonary . tuberculosis which involved fever and at Les Frenes Indira was often feverish.

 Suzanne Rollier, Dr Rollier's youngest daughter who taught Indira modern dance exercises in bed once a week. Suzanne had learned for  three years of studying modern dance at Margaret Morris's dance school in England. Indira was reserved and unapproachable even Feroze did not visit her at Les Fernes. She read her father’s book ‘Glimpses of World History’, while lying in position ventrale . She lost weight continouously so Dr Rollier gave her cod liver oil and phytic acid which improved her appetite slightly. Rollier also prescribed the archaic TB treatment of 'cupping' that was popular in the nineteenth century. She was a conscientious patient and followed all treatment religiously but after Four and a half months in bed [counting her time at Brentford Hospi­tal] she wasn’t much better. Nehru sent her ‘Takli’or  spindle to calm her anxieties.

         By early March Indira was feeling marginally better and Rollier allowed her to get up and take a fifteen-minute walk late in the afternoon, on the roof-top solarium and then sit in the downstairs lounge. She was also permitted to take a proper bath once a week. Her days now followed the regimented pattern of the other ambulatory patients: breakfast at 7.30 a.m.; position ventrale in bed wheeled out on the balcony in the morning; morning tea at eleven; dinner at one; the 'cure de silence' from two to four, during which Indira lay motionless in bed in her room. Reading and talking were banned during the cure de silence, and to ensure that it was silent the road- in front of Les Frenies was closed for two hours and the local farmers prohibited from .working in the nearby fields. Afternoon tea was at 4 o'clock; then Indira took her little walk at 4.30, followed by sitting in the lounge and knitting until six.Supper was served at seven, after which she listened to the wireless. Finally a bedtime glass of milk was brought on a tray at 9 p.m. Then the corridor lights were dimmed for the night and Indira turned off her bedside lamp. Very soon she found this new ambulatory routine at Les Frenes as deadening as the months spent in bed. She lived for letters from Feroze in London and Nehru in India. lndira followed volatile European situation. At the end of March, Indira had been at Leysin for three months. She wrote to Nehru assessing her ‘Progress’. There is no doubt that I am better now than when I arrived ...but not much. I look slightly better, I breathe much better. In weight I have gained 3 Ibs, my present weight being 85 Ibs. Just about a month ago I started getting up in the afternoons -

starting with fifteen minutes and now [I remain out of bed] for two and a half hours, during which I go for a short walk. On the other hand, that perpetual fatigue I used to feel is still a faithful companion, my appetite is not improving and I eat very little with great effort, and I don't sleep at all well.

      Dr Rollier confided now that she may leave to stay for a year at Les Fernes.Indira desperately wanted to leave and go to India.

     In late April, Dr Bhandari came to Leysin from London to see Indira and discuss her case with Dr Rollier. He and Rollier 'came to the unanimous decision', as Bhandari wrote to Nehru, that Indira should stay at Les Frenes, at least for some months longer.

     On new Year's Day 1941, Indira finally flew from Lisbon to Bristol Where Feroze - whom she had not seen in more than a year – was awaiting to meet her .They immediately took the train to London and went straight to Feroze's one-room flat in St John's Wood. The next day Indira cabled Nehru: 'Arrived last night. Well. Plans uncertain.

      They had been secretly engaged now for nearly four years. In 1941 German aircraft had been attacking British cities all the time. They kept on living together. Indira wanted an English registry wedding which Feroze opposed.

             But then she fell ill and the marriage issue was suspended. In February she began running ‘ the Usual High Temperature and was scared again’. She consulted Dr. Bhandari who detected fluid in her lungs. There is no evidence that Feroze was the least bit reluctant to marry Indira because of her uncertain health. They both knew that tuberculosis patients were told to stay single- advice that only made Indira even more determined to marry. But in early March, and with Feroze still opposed to London registry wedding, they both got last-minute berths on a steamer to India. By this time Indira’s other symptoms had considerably subsided and she was well enough to travel. Marriage was deferred.   

    Feroze and Indira sailed on the City of Paris - a troopship in a long convoy - on 10 March. They reached the Cape of Good Hope at the end of March. The City of Paris then steamed on to Durban where it paused for a week.

       It was in Durban that Indira inadvertently found her political voice and addressed a large Durban Indian community. From Durban they steamed north into the Indian occan, Port Madagascar and the Seychelles, up to the Arabian Sea and finally reached Bombay on 16^th April, 1941.This time Indira was coming home to India to stay. She was young, in love and on the verge of being someone else- ‘Indira Gandhi’.

      In June Indira went to Calcutta for three weeks with Dr. Madan Atal to get 'thoroughly overhauled* by medical specialists including Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy who was a Congress leader as well as an eminent physician.

When she returned to Mussoorie, her maternal grandmother, Rajpati Kaul, came from Delhi to stay with her. Indira confessed to her that she wanted to marry Feroze, and to her amazement, her grandmother raised no objections. Though Amma, as Indira called her, was an orthodox  Hindu, she knew that Indira neither Feroze were religious, Nehru tried to dissuade her from marriage and ordered her to discuss the matter with senior member of the family.

When she returned to Allahabad from Mussoorie in November, Indira first went to see Gandhi at Sevagram. Who also tried to dissuade her but seeing her determination gave his consent.They were married in a hindu ceremony.

On New Year's Day 1944 Indira was ill in bed. She was loosing weight and feeling awful(Infect, she was pregnant). She told Nehru that her doctor Vatsala Samant, wanted her to go to Bombay and put herself under the care of Dr. N.A Purandare, a well known gynecologist and obstetrician and live with Hutheesing until the baby was born in late August or early September.

            Ever since she had been a patient at Les Frenes, she was advised not to have children , but she always wanted to have many children.

                        At the end of June Indira had her 7 month pregnancy check up. She was seeing her doctor every fortnight. Her health was better than it had been in years . she felt energetic , happy and hopeful as the time for the delivery neared. In the eight month she switched to another obstetrician named Dr. Vttal Naresh Shirodkar who promised to deliver the baby himself (Dr. Puran dare had refused to give this guarantee).

            Feroze came to Bombay in mid-August to be with Indira, on 20^th early morning she woke Feroze and in the cool of the early morning they and Krishna Hatteesing drove to the nearby Belle Vue Nursing Home. Dr. Shirodkar was summoned after a remarkably easy and short labor a 6 ½ pound baby entered the world at 8:22 am .He was named Rajiva Ratna Birjes Nehru Gandhi which ultimately got to Rajiv Gandhi. (Feroze liked to live well.He was a great womanizer. He was loud, extroverted, boastful emotional, quick to loose his temper. There were strain in marriage as early as 1943).

            On 13^th December 1946 Indira and Feroze were staying in Delhi at Nehru’s York Road house because the baby was due. mid night Krishna and Feroze drove her to Willingdon NursingHOme, where a baby boy was born but Indira had suffered a massive hemorrhage. Sanjay Gandhi had arrived in the world from the start, he was big trouble.

              In December 1956 Indira returned from a nine-day trip to America with Nehru utterly exhausted . In early January 1957 she wrote to Padmaja Naidu, ‘ I am not feeling too good but what is required is not rest so much as a course of injections…it is the the old trouble . she went on to complain of anaemia, low blood pressure anda lack of calcium. It is likely that the ‘Course of Injections’, Indira sought out and received in 1957 was in fact aimed at eradicating ‘ the old trouble’ her long-standing tuberculosis.

              During the acute phase of her illness in the late thirties, when Indira was at Rollier’s Swiss sanatorium, there had been no cure for TB. Rest ‘ feeding up’ fresh air and sun were then the only and none too efficacious, treatments. But a decade later the  powerful drugs streptomycin, paraminosalicylic acid (PAS) and isonized, which individually or in combination can wipe out the TB bacillus, had been discovered . By the early fifties they were in general use in Europe and North America . in 1956 the pharmacological treatment of TB arrived in India when the tuberculosis chemotherapy center was opened in Madras, under the auspices of World Health Organization. TB patients in Madras were treated with daily streptomycin injections and PAS and isonized for a year and five year later 90 per cent of those who stayed the course of injections were clear of the disease. The Prime Minister of India – and his daughter inevitably would have known about the drug treatment for tuberculosis in use at the Madras TB Center.

              Though she later suffered from a serious kidney ailment; her figure rounded out; her coloring  changed from a sallow pallor to a ruddy hue; she ceased being periodically laid low with colds, coughs and flu. Photographs of her taken in the late fifties record this dramatic transformation. Earlier in the decade she looks thin. Frail, pale and hollow-eyed. By its end it is clear that Indira has gained a good stone or more; the dark circle under her eyes have disappeared; her skin is clear and fresh and her eyes bright ; she exudes radiance and energy.

            The remarkable metamorphosis supports the assumption that she did, in fact, receive drug treatment for TB in the fifties. Ever since childhood Indira had been ‘sickly’ but from the age of about forty – and she turned forty in 1957. She became an unusually healthy and fit woman. TB still, of course , a taboo disease in Indira, highly contagious and endemic among the poor. Though it was widely known that Kmala Nehru had died of the disease, after her death in the thirties, a veil had been drawn over the private affairs of the Nehru family, including their health.  

            In late 1959 Indira had kidney stone and on 17 February 1960 shortly after her term as Congress president expired, Indira was operated upon. Feroze was with her at the hospital and after she was discharged , he moved back into Teen Murti to nurse her during her Cuvalescence. Feroze died of heart attack on 8^th September at 48 years.

            Indira led an eventful, political life , on 31^st October 1984 early morning she was shot and killed by her sikh bodyguard, Beant Singh.